Pirsig again, in "Zen etc"

Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know.

So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before.

and then this, from the pivotal moment in the book

All this is just an analogy.

Fantastic, Phædrus thinks, that he should have remembered that. It just demolishes the whole dialectical position. That may just be the whole show right there. Of course it's an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don't know that.

...and one of the consequences - as we have explored here often enough - is that to change anything we have to change the narrative, and in doing so, in moving from Rhetoric to Reality, we reinvent religion...


"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson